About Me

After college and the army, I studied acting and theater; I have an MFA in Acting and uncompleted Ph.D. in Performance Studies (ABD). I have worked as an actor, director, dramaturg/literary advisor, critic/reviewer, essayist, editor, and teacher of theater and acting (studio/conservatory, college, high school, and middle school). Several years ago, some theater friends who don't live in New York anymore asked me to keep them informed about what I see and I began sending them detailed, opinionated e-mails.

20 October 2012

'Harper Regan'

I don't know what to make of Harper Regan, the new play by Simon Stephens being
presented through Sunday, 4 November, by the Atlantic Theater Company. I mean that literally: I don't know what to make
of it because I can't figure it out. I can't
see why Stephens wrote it or why anyone would produce it.My frequent theater companion Diana had the
exact same response. (The people sitting
behind us at the Linda Gross Theater on the evening of Friday, 12 October, left
at intermission and the guy sitting next to me kept falling asleep.) I’d read Ben Brantley’s near-rave review in
the New York Times on Thursday, but what he saw is a
mystery. Brantley wasn't just positive,
he was enthusiastic, while I got nothing from the play at all—not even any especially
compelling performances. Now, I’ve often
had disagreements with Brantley, enough so that I take his assessments with
more than a grain of salt, but usually I can find some inkling of what he’d
seen, good or bad, that differed with my estimation.This time, though, we’re so far apart it’s
unfathomable to me.

After a strange
meeting with her boss, at which she asks for time off to visit her dying father
and her boss refuses her request, 41-year-old Harper Regan walks away from the job
she hates, her Uxbridge home in the suburbs of West London, and her husband and
teenaged daughter.She doesn’t tell anyone
she’s going to Manchester to see her father, who’s slipped into a diabetic
coma, in the hospital. Harper and her
family used to live near Manchester, in Stockport (playwright Stephens’s own
hometown) where her mother, from whom she’s been estranged, still lives but
from which the Regans had to move when husband Seth was accused of creating
child porn.Harper believes he’s
innocent and the pictures he took of children in the park and stored on his
computer were misconstrued; she also believes that her mother thinks Seth is
guilty while her father supported her contention.Harper no longer speaks to her mother,
separated from Harper’s father and remarried now to a much younger man.The visit to Manchester, where she’s arrived
only to find that her father had died, will change that and a lot of what
Harper thinks is settled family history.While she’s away, Harper stabs a young man she meets in a bar in the
neck with a broken wine glass and has nearly-anonymous sex with a stranger on
the floor of a hotel duplex (she’s never seen a hotel room with two floors and
a staircase). When she gets back to
London, she goes straight for a bridge where she earlier met a 17-year-old
schoolmate of her daughter and reveals that she’s actually been stalking him
for weeks. The Atlantic’s press release
concludes that “we are folded into an absorbing story about a woman who
explores the limits of loyalty, morality, and the bonds of family.”

Harper Regan premiered
under Marianne Elliott's direction
at the Cottesloe Theatre of the National Theatre in April 2008 with Lesley
Sharp as Harper Regan.The play had its
Israeli premiere at the Gesher Theater in Tel Aviv in November 2009 in Oded
Kotler’s staging with Laura Rivlin in the title role and the U.S. premiere was
at the Steep Theatre in Chicago in January 2010 with Robin Witt directing Kendra
Thulin as Harper.Staged by Gaye Taylor Upchurch, the director of Stephens’s first and only
previous New York production, theNew York premièrebegan at the Atlantic with previews on 20 September
and the opening on 10 October.On 15
October, the theater announced the production would be extended an additional
week from its original closing on 28 October.

Simon Stephens, at
41 the author of two dozen plays, has won, among other honors, an Olivier
Award for Best New Play, On the Shore ofthe Wide World at the
Manchester Royal Exchange and the National Theatre in 2005.He’s considered a writer in the “in-yer-face”
theater movement, a confrontational style of playwriting that started in the
1990s.According to coiner Aleks Sierz, a British theater critic, the
term means theater that “grabs the audience by the scruff of the neck and
shakes it until it gets the message. . . .It implies being forced to see something close up, having your personal
space invaded. It suggests the crossing
of normal boundaries.”Stephens’s
work includes Bluebird, the
dramatist’s Off-Broadway début presented by ATC last year; in 1998, it
was the writer’s maiden presentation at the Royal Court, which has since
produced many of his works.(His first play,
which premièred at the Edinburgh Festival in 1997, was Bring
Me Sunshine.)Stephens’s work has often
been seen abroad, including productions in Germany (Pornography at the Deutsches
Schauspielhaus in Hanover, 2007; The Trial of Ubu at the Schauspielhaus
in Essen, 2010; ThreeKingdoms at the Kammerspiele in Munich, 2011), Estonia (ThreeKingdomsat the NO99 Theatre in Tallinn, 2011),
Holland (The Trial of Ubu at the Toneelgroep Amsterdam, 2010), as well
as diverse theaters around the U.K.(Stephens
is one of the two most-produced English playwrights in Germany.)He’s also written for television (Dive for Granada TV and the BBC, and an
adaptation of Pornography for Channel
4, both 2009).His latest works include The
Curious Incident of the Dog in theNight-Time, adapted from Mark Haddon’s novel, at the National Theatre and Morning
at the Traverse Theatre and Lyric Hammersmith, both this year.Stephens is currently under commission to the
Young Vic, Manchester Royal Exchange, and the National Theatre, where he was
named the first Writer-in-Residence ever in 2005.

The writer was born in 1971 in Stockport, a suburb of
Manchester, and he’s set many of his plays there.His father, with whom he had a strained
relationship because of the older man’s conservative politics, died in 2001 at
59.As in Harper Regan, Stephens’s family life included “fracturing and
reconciling,” including a resolution of conflicts with his mother after his
father’s death.“I think writers have
obsessions that they return to in play after play, and I certainly have mine
around family and Stockport—whether it is possible to tell the truth, the
consequences of lying and whether it’s possible to ever go home again,” the
playwright has said.He left Stockport, the
small-town atmosphere of which he disliked, after graduating from the
University of York and lived two years (1992-94) in Edinburgh (where he joined
the punk-rock band Country Teasers) before moving to London where he now lives
with his wife and young children.

Harper Regan was originally going to be titled Seth Regan and focus on the
husband.Stephens originally planned to explore
how sexual misconduct engenders emotional turmoil that arises when sexual
appetites collide with moral principle.Then
he met at the National Theatre with Nicholas Hytner, who was looking for plays
with important parts for actresses in their 40’s and 50’s.At first Stephens resisted Hytner’s hints,
but he began to ruminate on the shift of focus from Seth Regan to Harper.He said he found the idea “[m]uch more
interesting.”Even though Seth’s
problems are still at the center of the play, the perspective became Harper’s.Most analysts say the play’s about Harper’s
mid-life crisis, but that seems a piddly theme for the 21st century.Even actress Mary McCann, who plays the role
at ATC, spoke of having “gone through something of a midlife crisis too.”McCann, though, adds, “This is a woman who
finds herself finally facing up to truth in her life and dealing with that
truth . . . .”Even that dramatically
richer point is wan for our times, I think—though I’ve noticed from the British
TV shows we see here that their society is several decades behind ours when it
comes to feminism and female empowerment, at least in fiction.(Consider the great British TV series Prime Suspect which was driven by two
forces: the prickly, often abrasive personality of the detective played by
Helen Mirren and the overtly sexist environment of the still-heavily male
police establishment in England even as women officers, even high-ranking ones,
were common here, in fiction if not in real life.)

My problem is that I
haven’t been able to come up with a better statement of what Stephens was
writing about in Harper Regan.(I don’t subscribe to the notion apparently
advocated by playwright Sam Shepard, as I quoted him in my 10 September ROT report on Heartless, that we shouldn’t “ask what a play is
about” or Village Voice reviewer Michael Feingold’s contention “those
who pursue logical explanations” should be disparaged.)A play that’s not about something holds no
interest for me and is ultimately a waste of stage space.It’s also hard to write about a play whose
central idea I can’t uncover, so I’m left with a bit of a conundrum here.All I have is little more than a flat
statement that, in addition to a play that didn’t have anything to say to me,
the characters are uninteresting, the situations contrived and inflated, the
acting unengaging, the directing lifeless, and the physical production dreary.When we were having a snack after the
performance, I said to Diana that what confounded me most was that for ATC to
have produced Harper Regan, someone not only had to have read the
script, but probably would have seen the play on stage in London or perhaps
Chicago.How does a presumably
theater-savvy pro see this script in production and still want to do it?To me, it’s like having someone watch a guy
get his tongue nailed to a post and then saying, ‘Gee, I’d like to try that.’Why, for heaven’s sake?

As I was searching the ’Net for reviews of the
New York staging after I saw it—I read the Times when it comes out
because I subscribe to the paper, but I do a ’Net search for other notices
after the performance—I came across a blog from the Theatre Development Fund, TDF
Stages.(TDF is the organization
that operates the TKTS booth in Duffy Square.)In his article “This Room Isn’t Real (But The Feelings Are),” Mark
Blankenship argues that director Upchurch chose the production style for Harper
Regan deliberately and with a lot of consideration.Blankenship, the on-line newsletter’s editor,
describes the style of the ATC production:

In her production at the Atlantic Theater Company, director Gaye Taylor
Upchurch reminds us that Harper Regan hovers just above reality, that Harper’s
on a symbolic journey like Odysseus or Everyman. Actors keep their movements to a minimum, and
the set (designed by Rachel Hauck) suggests locations instead of stating them. When it’s time to change scenes, we even see
the actors push walls into new configurations, reminding us we’re in the
theatre.

Leaving aside the
point that Odysseus’ and Everyman’s journeys are both mythic and universally
momentous—Everyman’s is to the afterlife and Odysseus has given his name to
signify an extended adventurous voyage, an intellectual or spiritual quest—which
doesn’t seem to me to fit Harper’s “glum little journey” to Manchester,
Blankenship appears to be about to try to justify Upchurch’s bland, soulless
production on the basis that it’s symbolically minimalist.He even quotes Upchurch herself in his
apologia: “Simon’s dialogue always seems very naturalistic, but actually
there’s a poetry to it that’s very deliberate and very spare . . . it doesn’t
require a kitchen sink.”

First, I’d have to
dispute that there’s much poetry in Stephens’s dialogue, which Linda Winer
characterizes as “long, bogus streams of consciousness”; at least I didn’t hear
anything lyrical in the vein of, say, David Mamet or August Wilson whose prose
often rises to the level of what Anna Deavere Smith calls “natural
poetry.”But whether it does or not, Harper Regan certainly doesn’t need
kitchen-sink Naturalism.The
alternative, however, isn’t gray-carpeted platforms and partitions the actors
flip up or down to reset each scene.There’s
surely a whole theatrical world in between those poles that isn’t drab and
untheatrical.Furthermore, when I saw
that the actors were shifting all the scenery (including flipping the panels of
the collapsible set or hauling the occasional hand prop and piece of furniture
that Hauck has incorporated into the design), I didn’t see it as a Brechtian
way to remind us “we’re in the theatre”; I thought it was just a way of
eliminating stage hands.

According to
Upchurch, this is also the rationale for the static acting.She wanted to make “sure we weren’t doing
anything movement-wise that would take away from the tension.”Accepting that there is tension, then, no, a
director doesn’t want to dissipate it by gratuitous movement by the
actors.But, again, the alternative
isn’t near immobility in an almost bare set.Hauck explains that this strategy was also part of the design decisions:
“What’s the bare minimum that we can do this scene with?” Upchurch would ask
her designer.This leads to some
contrived and unlikely actions by the actors now and then, for instance in the
fairly realistic scene between Harper and her mother, set in the older woman’s
suburban kitchen.Within the gray-walled
space, Alison is chopping vegetables at a small teacart she’s using as a
butcher-block table.The cart’s crowded
with objects for the task of making a salad plus a few other things like a
pitcher of water with lime slices.First, why in the kitchen everything would have to be piled onto the
tiny cart when there’s certainly a counter and a sink, and so on, I can’t
explain.(Yes, I know English kitchens
are smaller than American suburban ones—but this is a house, not a flat, and
the kitchen is surely larger than the one in my Manhattan apartment and I have
a couple of small counter tops.Besides,
when Alison’s husband and his apprentice join the two women briefly, they have
plenty of room to walk around.Two
people, let alone four, couldn’t fit in my kitchen—forget about walking around
in it.)So when Harper has to put
something down on the cart and it’s a tight squeeze, I wondered why she
wouldn’t set it down on a counter or in the sink.The business is illogical, not symbolic.You want to pare down the naturalism of your
set, then pare down the naturalism of the action, too.When Grotowski mandated getting rid of all
unnecessary spectacle in his theater, he didn’t then plan to stage the actual
preparation of a meal on a wooden platform with a crate for a prop.

What am I bitching
about?An awkward bit of staging?Well, not exactly.It’s emblematic of a kind of half-thought-out
concept.Upchurch directed ATC’s
production of Stephens’s Bluebird
last season but I didn’t see it so I don’t know if she used a similar
approach.Her program bio doesn’t list
any other titles, so I don’t know anything about her previous work—though I
assume she’s a relatively inexperienced director. (Upchurch, who seems to be about 38 now, graduated
from Wake Forest University in 1996 and, aside from staging ATC’s Bluebird, has an Off-Broadway
assistant-director credit in 2007 and two assistant directorships on Broadway
in 2007 and ’08, all for musicals.)What
it looks like to me is the work of an artist with some still-forming ideas that
she hasn’t really integrated yet, applying them in one area without
anticipating that they’ll have inapt repercussions somewhere else.It also appears that she’s trying out ideas
that seem right in the abstract, in a theoretical sense, but haven’t been
tested on the ground before she committed to them.Furthermore, Blankenship is arguing that Upchurch
has wisely chosen this non-Naturalistic production style to strengthen
Stephens's point theatrically.A director
can have an arguably valid concept and even execute it successfully, but end up
with a bad show.Even if all the
director's ideas are correct and reasonable—and they might be under the right
circumstances—she can still mount a dull and lackluster production by removing
all the potential personality from the staging.If Blankenship’s right—and given Upchurch’s own statements, I assume he
is—I think that’s what’s happened in ATC’s Harper
Regan.

In Blankenship’s
article, Upchurch finishes up by stating that “it was important to establish
why we should care about [Harper’s] journey and her family . . . .”That’s a fairly obvious goal, dramatically
speaking, but, yeah, that’s right.We do
have to care or there’s no effective drama.The problem is, that’s what happens.I started out by complaining that Ben Brantley seems to have reported on
a different play than the one Diana and I saw.But, ironically, Elisabeth Vincentelli of the New York Post, seems to have seen the production I caught.In fact, she puts her reply to Upchurch’s directorial
objective quite succinctly: whatever
else we learn about Harper, “we still need to be invested in what happens to
her, otherwise there’s no show”;
yet, the reviewer laments, the title character ends up being “the least
interesting . . . character ever invented.”Vincentelli opens her review
pretty bluntly:

Welcome to the most
boring midlife crisis of the year. No
matter what happens to Harper Regan, the title character of Simon Stephens’ new
drama, it’s hard to care.

Her supervisor snottily
denies her time off to visit her ailing father: We don’t care.

She discovers her dad
has died: don’t care.

She goes AWOL from her
husband and daughter: still nothing.

As for the notion that Harper’s spree has been a great journey of
discovery, Vincentelli observes that while we learn the odd detail of her life,
such as her favorite bands, “[b]igger issues . . . are pushed aside.”Harper’s excursion is little more than “a
series of more or less preposterous encounters,” hardly an odyssey.The Post
review-writer sums up her response to the performance, which she describes as “a
mediocre play given a mediocre production,” by adding, “The most emotion this
show creates is the joy of finally being able to leave the theater after two
hours and 20 minutes of mind-numbing soul-searching.”

As for the performances, even Vincentelli has praise for “some worthy supporting turns,” but by the
time the production was under way, I’d lost interest so thoroughly that I had
trouble focusing much on the cast’s work.(I did note as the performance was unfolding that every member of the Harper Regan cast had problems with the
various regional and class dialects of the characters.The production’s dialect coach is Ben
Furey.)Mary McCann’s Harper is as bland
and unengaging as the play, leaving the production without a center.McCann is a founding member of ATC (and wife
of artistic director Neil Pepe), but I’ve never seen any of her other work, so
I don’t know how this performance compares.(Most reviews say she’s immensely talented and appealing.)Considering the other evidence on display
here, I blame Upchurch, who previously directed McCann in the Stephens début, Bluebird, last season, for all the
acting, including McCann’s.(The script
has to be blamed as well, of course.)Stephens
speaks of the actress’s emotional depth and others praise her talent for being
both vulnerable and tough, intelligent and emotional, and so on, but I saw only
suppressed and artificial, trying to put across the baseless actions in the calculated
vignettes if not convincingly, then consistently.

Those supporting
performances vary from unpersuasive to downright annoying.In that last category I put Madeleine Martin
(who appears on cable TV’s Californication)
as Harper’s daughter, Sarah.Petulant is
the operative word for the character, a stereotypically prickly teen, but
Martin’s characterization is grating and studied, as if the character were
asking herself at every turn, ‘What can I do to get under my parents’
skins?’Martin’s performance is further
undermined by her nasally and sharp voice, which Marilyn Stasio describes as “the metallic whine of an industrial
saw” in Variety.Gareth
Saxe does a commendable job with a severely neglected role, ironic if it was
originally intended to be the title part.From what we learn of the character, he should be unlikeable, but Saxe
neutralizes that even as he essentially disappears except as a plot point.

Many of the
reviewers like Jordan Lage’s portrayal of Elwood Barnes, Harper’s cold and
creepy boss, and I’m forced to agree that the actor pulls this weird guy off
while projecting enough humor to keep Barnes from becoming a total turn-off; in
fact, his arguments almost seem reasonable—before he makes what sounds like a
proxy pass at Harper’s teenaged daughter.Of the people Harper meets in her jaunts outside the home and office,
the most passable performance is turned in by Christopher Innvar (whom I saw do
an ineffective and ineffectual Petruchio in a 2007 Washington staging of The Taming of the Shrew) as the married
man Harper meets on the Internet and has a one-night stand with in the
Manchester hotel room.Like a lot of the
supporting characters in this play, James Fortune should be thoroughly icky,
but Innvar manages to make him actually kind.Perhaps the flashiest role is Peter Scanavino’s Mickey Nestor, the self-proclaimed
journalist with a violent and virulent anti-Semitic streak whom Harper stabs in
the neck with a shattered glass.The
performance is all bluster and shouting, however, and the violence—both his and
Harper’s—comes out of nowhere as if Stephens decided he needed something big to
liven up the script.(Well, he does, but
this doesn’t cut it.)As the teen Harper
meets on the bridge near her home, Tobias Rich, Stephen Tyrone Williams (who
appeared as the Xhosa student in Athol Fugard’s My Children! My Africa! at the Signature—where he also had accent
problems—on which I reported on 11 June) barely pulls off the age (he’s in his
mid-20’s) and, though he, too, is a favorite among the reviewers, I didn’t feel
Williams came off as anything more than a cypher (though I think the actor was aiming
for “enigma”).

Finally, I need
to say something about Mary Beth Peil as Harper’s mother, Alison Woolley.(The actress also plays the meddling
mother-in-law of Julianna Margulies’s character on TV’s The Good Wife.)I’ll
discount what must be one of the oddest hairdos on this decade’s stages—I can’t
really describe it except to say that it’s a cascade of gray frizz that
continually falls into Peil’s face—and say that I could well understand what
might put Harper off her and Peil gets that across palpably.I’m still not sure why Harper’s supposed to
believe Alison’s version of events after believing for so long that her mother
has been on the wrong side of family conflicts, but that’s Stephens’s
responsibility, not Peil’s.She’s still
a control freak and a dragon lady as far as her daughter is concerned, and Peil
intimates that she’s got something more up her sleeve that the play doesn’t
reveal, and that makes the character at least fully rounded instead of the
cardboard cut-outs presented by the other actors.(Once again, I’m going to lay the blame for
this on the director and the playwright.Actors get fired if they defy their directors too openly—although I did
once take over a production from which the cast had fired the director!)

I’ve already characterized Brantley’s Times review; he calls Harper
Regan “beautiful, sharp and melancholy” and Upchurch’s staging a “geometrically
precise production.”The Timesman praises every choice Upchurch
made, as well as every element of Stephens’s script (Harper’s get-away, which
Brantley also dubs an odyssey, rises to the level of “a born-again epiphany”) and
every performance from the cast (McCann is “stunning”); absolutely nothing in
this production is wrong in Brantley’s estimation.

On the other end of the spectrum, of course, is
Vincentelli’s Post evaluation, which
I’ve already quoted sufficiently.In
between lie all the rest of the published critical response.Of the 11 other reviews I read, three are mostly
positive, six are largely negative, and two are mixed but leaning positive.(With the Times’s
rave and the Post’s pan, that makes
the tally 4 pos-7 neg-2 mixed.)The
issues on both sides of the divide were basically the same ones raised by
Brantley, Vincentelli, and me.In the Daily News, Joe Dziemianowicz
writes, “Life is messy, and the British playwright Simon Stephens captures that
fact,” though he does add that “the drone of willful eccentricity at times
drowns out the ring of authenticity.”Upchurch’s
production is “thoughtful” and Hauck’s “canny convertible set” is “efficiently
and intriguingly designed.”Former New York Times reviewer
Wilborn Hampton in the Huffington Post calls Harper Regan a
“searing play” which “is full of surprises, though upon reflection they may not
be all that surprising.”“Stephens,”
Hampton asserts, “is a subtle playwright whose delicately crafted scenes are
deceptively dramatic. Harper Regan
is one of those plays that at first may seem as though nothing much is
happening, but in which everything is happening.”The ATC production is “studiously underplayed”
by the “splendid” cast—McCann’s acting is “a quiet tour-de-force”—which makes “Harper's
journey of self-discovery a small gem.”The
AP’s Jennifer Farrar says that Stephens’s “insightful drama” is “an uncannily honest portrait” in a “well-crafted
production” at ATC. The AP reviewer
affirms that “McCann is luminous” in the title role and the ensemble exhibits
“mindful restraint.”“Upchurch creates a
permanent sense of tension” with Stephens’s “masterful” dialogue which is “naturalistic,
sometimes ambivalent.”The playwright’s
“an expert at conveying the defining moments that can occur in ordinary
conversations,” concludes Ferrar.

Coming down on
the other side of the difference of opinion is Marilyn Stasio of Variety, who declares that the crisis of Harper Regan “is wasted on
an uninspiring character” whom Stasio calls a “bore.”The play is “schematic” and, Stasio suggests,
“episodic” and “artificial.”The
reviewer sums up: “It took some courage for Regan to leave this place. Too bad she had to come back.”The New
Yorker’s Hilton Als, calling the play “nearly pointless” and “drivel,” sums
it up by dubbing its premise “forced dramatic tension.”(Als singles out Madeleine Martin as “the
loudest actress . . . on the American stage.”)In Newsday, Linda Winer seems
to have a positive estimation of the play, offering several left-handed
compliments until her last line when she observes that “there's something wrong when we care more
about” one of the subsidiary characters “than about [Harper] or her journey.”Back
Stage’s Suzy Evans opens her notice by saying, “Rachel Hauck’s layered set
beautifully illustrates what Simon Stephens’ ‘Harper Regan’ only attempts to
achieve,” by which she meant “the many facets of Harper’s existence.”Evans explains that “the script fails to
grasp these layers” and asserts that “Upchurch’s stiff direction keeps
Stephens’ dialogue from flowing and causes the interactions to feel calculated.”
The Back
Stage review-writer concludes that “in trying to complicate the
uncomplicated, ‘Harper Regan’ is far too muddled for its own good.”In Entertainment
Weekly, Thom Geier proclaims that Stephens’s “overly talky” play “does not
always live up to the promise of its title character.”Other than the family scenes, Geier feels
that Harper’s encounters “have a tendency to drag” as the script “meanders into
narrative cul-de-sacs.”The scenes tend
“ to falter in the authenticity department,” says Geier. “They just don't always ring true.” On the website TheaterMania, David Finkle maintains that Stephens has written some
“striking” plays up to now, but proclaims, Harper
Regan “simply doesn't impress as one of them.”Finkle describes the play as “bland,” a
“series of . . . relatively unedifying chats” whose premise is “a stale conceit
that doesn't make for engaging drama.”He
calls the ATC production a “troubled work” in which the set design is “just one
more miscalculation.”

The men in the
middle are Michael Feingold of the Village
Voice and Scott Brown of New York magazine.Feingold, describing Harper Regan as
“intriguing,” reports, “It's
indecisive but constantly alive.”He
adds that though Harper is “always believable,” her “late emergence from her
shell of passivity makes the play problematic.”In general, Feingold,
who’s often a contrarian I’ve observed, asserts, “Along with the clearly intended moral ambiguities, Stephens
proffers muddy dramaturgical uncertainties, presenting his heroine as a series
of tentative hypotheses that don't equal a fully portrayed statement,” but
continues, the playwright has “Upchurch's sharp, austerely clean-lined
production to keep his vagaries from drifting away.” In the New Yorker, Brown, who equivocates a lot in his review, starts off by saying, “Everything about
Harper Regan—and everything about Harper Regan—feels dislocated . . . . It’s a puzzling sensation, and sometimes Simon
Stephens’s midlife-walkabout is merely that: puzzling. Sometimes it approaches ghostly sublimity.”Scott
continues in this “on the one hand/on the other” vein:

The show’s a kind of
comedy and Harper is a kind of clown, but the laughs, such as they are,
reverberate inward, and they bruise. And,
occasionally, simply mystify.

Many of Harper’s run-ins
and elliptical conversations have a stuttering, first-draft feel to them, and
some simply seem extraneous—this might’ve been a one-act, were it not for the
marginalia.

Of Stephens’s “sequential but atomized vignettes,” Brown writes: “Some of
these pas de deux are mesmerizing; others, eye-glazing; still others,
strangely repetitive, as if looped.”Upchurch’s
staging, Brown adds, “often aggravates and underlines this agglomerative,
ramblesome quality.” In his ultimate
analysis, however, Brown states that Harper
Regan is “both probing
and, yes, prurient.”

[I don’t know if it says
anything about this play or production, but I found that this crop of reviews
contains a larger number of small factual errors (plus one grammar mistake)
than I’ve seen before.Maybe it has
something to do with the review-writers’ having trouble focusing on the
performance closely enough to catch the facts as they go by.Two writers, for instance, misstated the age
of Sarah, Harper’s daughter: Linda Winder in Long Island’s Newsday, who said the character was 14, and Jennifer Ferrar of the AP, who
described her as “college-age.”Sarah’s
17 (the same age as Tobias, the schoolmate Harper’s been stalking) but I can
see where Ferrar’s misunderstanding might have come from.Sarah goes to “college,” but it’s not an
American-style post-high school institution; that’s what Europeans, including
Brits, call “university.”In the U.K.
and the Commonwealth, “college” is a private secondary school, usually of high
academic standing, for students 16 to 18 years old.(In my junior year of high school, I went to
the Collège du Léman near Geneva.)And
speaking of Tobias, two reviewers, New York’s Scott Brown and Suzy Evans
of Back Stage, put his encounters with Harper on a “train” or “tube” (that’s the
subway to Brits) platform.In both
scenes, they met at the Grand Union Canal, which Harper points out runs from
London to Birmingham, making a bit of a deal of it.Back Stage’s Evans also put the Regan’s suburban London home in “Oxbridge,” which
isn’t actually a place at all.(“Oxbridge” is the portmanteau name—think “Brangelina”—that refers to
the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge.)The Regans live in Uxbridge—just as the
program states.And Brown is the only
reviewer to age poor Harper from 41 to 43.Referring to a different meeting in the play, Marilyn Stasio wrote in Variety that Harper picked up James Fortune in an Internet café, but that
skips a step.Harper used a computer at
the café to hook up with James; then they met in real life (at the hotel, I
believe).Stasio’s oddest slip, though,
is her assertion that Harper has no reaction to Mickey’s“vile anti-Semitic outburst” in the bar except to walk off
with his leather jacket.Really, Marilyn?She busts a glass and stabs him in the neck,
for Pete’s sake! (Oh, and that grammatical
error was committed by Joe Dziemianowicz in the Daily News when he wrote that Harper visited
her mother “who she hasn’t talked to in years.”Say it ain’t so, Joe!Should be “whom
she hasn’t talked to . . . .”I hereby
sentence you to stand in Times Square and apologize to the spirit of William
Safire while receiving 20 lashes with a wet “On Language” column.)]

1 comment:

'Harper Regan" opened in Tel Aviv, as I noted above, in November 2009. When I sent a copy of my report on the New York première to my friend Helen in Tel Aviv, she wrote me back that she'd not only seen the play, but covered the Israeli début for the Jerusalem Post. Helen was nice enough to send me a copy of her JP notice, which ran in the paper on 2 December 2009. With Helen's permission, here is her review of 'Harper Regan':

Harper Regan (Liora Rivlin) wants time off to visit her dying father. Elwood Barnes (Dudu Niv), her thick-skinned workaholic boss, says no. When she gets home that evening, it's the same-old, same-old from emotionally hunched husband Seth (Dov Glikman) and rebellious teen daughter Sarah (Lucy Dubinchik). Harper runs, telling nobody where she's going. Her two day odyssey takes her from her London suburb to her native Stockport, near Manchester, and back home. On the way she encounters strange men, one in a pub, another in a hotel room, confronts the mother (Fira Kantor) she hasn't seen in two years, and learns some troubling truths.

"What kind of a name is Harper?" is a recurring question that really asks "what kind of life is this?" and she has no answer. Harper perches uneasily on her life and if she returns home, it is not so much that she has found answers but because she has redefined the question. "Regret poisons," she says.

Michael Karamenko's prison-like set of grey/brown walls, apertures and sliding panels complements the characters' mental agorophobia as they skirt, evade and hide their own realities, with a recurring frieze of a child jumping rope providing an ironic counterpoint.

This is a dream role for an actress, but the talented Liora Rivlin is here oddly monochromatic as though what is happening to Harper happens only on the outside. Altogether, the production lacks nuance with everybody gabbling their lines at top speed. Harper Regan prods and pokes. Its words/ideas must have time to register, and Kottler has not allowed for that, which is a pity.

Glikman and Dubinchik are effective as husband and daughter, Kantor makes a wonderfully smug mother and as Barnes, Niv injects an intriguing menace. As Tobias Rich, a teenager on the threshold of life, Daniel Tscharnish is appealing, but it is Boris Achanov who takes the honors. His Duncan Woolley, the mother's second husband, has the breadth and life the production lacks.

—Helen Kaye

Back on 12 September 2010, I published an article from Helen on Israeli summer entertainments for children, "Help! It's August: Kid-Friendly Summer Festivals in Israel." At the time, I reported that she promised to send in more reports on goings-on in Israel and though that promise has been long in coming to fruition, I now have two reports on the recent Acre Festival of Alternative Israeli Theatre. I'll be publishing the reports on ROT in the very near future.